1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mechanism for moving the lower limbs connected to the body of a toy figure to enable the toy figure to walk over a supporting surface in a similar manner to a human being, in which each of the limbs includes a thigh-shaped portion, a lower-leg-shaped portion connected to the adjacent end of the thigh-shaped portion by a knee joint, and a foot-shaped portion connected to the lower-leg-shaped portion by an ankle joint, and in which a drive means, housed in a compartment of the body of the toy figure, is connected to the thigh-shaped portion in order to impart thereto a pivoting movement in a vertical plane parallel to the direction in which the toy figure is made to walk, and a rectilinear translational movement in the direction of the longitudinal axis of the thigh-shaped portion between a lower dead-point position and an upper dead-point position and vice versa, the movements relating to one limb being out of phase by 180.degree. with the homologous movements of the other limb and the toy figure having means for counterbalancing the reaction torque generated by the drive means during the movement of the thigh-shaped portion.
2. Description of the Released Art
Toy figures, particularly dolls of human or fantasy appearance, having limb-movement and walking mechanisms are known in the art.
Examples of these mechanisms are described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,641,964, WO-92/21416, EP-A-0743083, EP-A-0879625 and in J-A-63/163894.
However, the performance of known mechanisms is limited since the toy figures have simplified and rather stiff joints, producing regular walking movements very different from those of a human being.
Moreover, none of the known mechanisms mentioned above enables the toy figure to adopt positions in which the limbs are bent, for example, a sitting position with the limbs bent at a right angles to the torso, without causing damage or breakage such as to compromise the functionality of the mechanism.